Written between 1889 and 1891, the Concert is unique in the chamber music repertoire—scored for solo violin and piano with string quartet. Chausson entitled it Concert (French for concerto) rather than “Sextet,” but the work lies somewhere between a double concerto, in which the two solo instruments are pitted against an entire orchestra, and a sextet, in which all the instruments are more or less equal. Chausson dedicated the Concert to Eugène Ysaÿe, who played the solo violin part at the premiere in Brussels on March 4, 1892. The Crickboom Quartet played the remaining string parts, and Auguste Pierret, the pianist. The artists on this CD perform at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Cadogan Hall (London), 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall (New York), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Bolívar Hall (London), Teatro Teresa Carreño (Caracas), Auditorio Blas Galindo (México, DF), Auditorio Manuel de Falla, (Granada), the Teatro Mayor (Bogotá), and for renowned organizations such as the BBC Proms Festival, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Chamber Music Society of Detroit.

Roberto Aussel writes: "Paths, encounters, surprises, joys, sorrows, gratitude and an infinite space for research have been the components which led me to express in the present recording the feelings this music conveys to me. Europe, Buenos Aires and La Pampa it is a tribute to Astor Piazzolla by a European composer. The music from Buenos Aires and La Pampa harmonize in this record to express the soul of music. As Atahualpa Yupanqui said, a journey is made of endless arrivals. Discovering each of these pieces has given me an enormous motivation to learn and follow new paths, like a true channel telling a musical story. It is as if it were a very long trail. When you walk through it from a point to another to know and explore it, you find rest, you long to walk again to reach a new resting point and to start again."

America, that vast continent divided by geographic and cultural peculiarities, holds ties which sometimes are more surprising than what they would seem. Their riches come to life and are expressed through artistic means. We now focus on the musical ones, taking two of the most remarkable genres in the world as an example: jazz and tango. Fusion is the keyword, an essential element for the development of culture and society. Claudio Constantini holds an international and multi-faceted career as a performer of two instruments, the piano and the bandoneón, as well as being a composer in demand. Born and raised in Lima (Perú) into a musician´s family, Constantini´s unique style is defined by its solid classical roots paired with a passion for popular music genres, among which Latin American music and improvisation play a key role.

Juan Carlos Garvayo writes: “I conceived 33 Dreams as sort of a strange trip to a supposedly shifting center that can be found both inside and outside consciousness. The dreams here are coded messages that help draw the map, and their poetic translation is the exerted result of their decoding in a precise language of symbols. In the road we find seas, magical places, real and imaginary persons, whirlpools, spirals, monsters, gods, abysses, and a myriad array of both typical and archetypal images found in the quest for my emotional, intellectual and poetic need. Roberto Sierra uses this trip structure, “journey” as he prefers to say (in fact, one third of the piece was composed during a cruise crossing in his Caribbean sea), in order to connect his 33 Dreams with the tradition of the great song cycles of German romanticism. In par with another journey song cycle, Winterreise, the music of 33 Dreams penetrates not only inside the poetic text, but also into its interstices, to achieve a superior level of comprehension in which the daydream acquires reality and reality blurs into daydream; Roberto manages in a prodigious way the capability of the symbolic adaptation of music to enhance the dream, to profile it and to vivify it, in such a way that it acquires another dimension fuller in content, meaning and beauty. The music also contributes to the text form and structure through an intricate net of musical parameters created by the composer: melody, rhythm, harmony, color and texture, which inject light and thickness to Ariadne’s thread within the poetic sub consciousness, inviting us to follow him as if a luring bait and thus making us enter into an initiatory trip of uprooting, stripping, pain, longing, illumination and return to origin.”

Jean Maurice Mourat writes: “Any physical or external journey implies taking an interior one, one that reaches sensations and impressions and catches the general atmosphere and feelings. I visited Granada and the Alhambra Palace for the first time in September 1976. Many adjectives come to my mind to describe that personal experience but if I was to sum it up I would say it was love at first sight. Shortly afterwards, I felt compelled to discover the rest of this magnificent region of Southern Spain, Andalucia, one that has inspired me the most and for which I wrote a great deal of music pieces. It could be because I found there a great wealth of colors and emotions, along with a source of inspiration in the local folk art and Spanish classical music that completed my musical training, which completed my personal inspiration. Inspiration comes from a soul explosion and in the ‘Alma Andaluza’ [‘the Andalucian soul’] - although there have been precedents in other recordings- I declare my love and respect for this land. This album is the result of my thirty years of living in the region. Throughout this musical journey, one may find elements of the Spanish and local folk songs in the various scales, melodies and motifs, including in the compositions themselves. The ongoing dialogue between the instruments, the harmony between the various ensembles, the brilliant interpretation and rich colour effects assert the high professional and artistic quality of the musicians. They merge the listener into a quite harmonious atmosphere.”

We are facing the first recording of complete Guitar Sonatas of Leo Brouwer, the most important guitar music composer of the modern era. In his music in general and in his Sonatas for Guitar in particular, tradition is intermingled with the latest stylistic and intellectual tendencies and is not limited only to what is erroneously called “refined music”. The different cultures -from the most tribal to the most elitist ones-, political-social phenomena, religions, the arts in any of their manifestations as well as the same human thought and feeling inspire and feed the Master’s sound world. Consequently, the challenge of recording his Sonatas for Guitar was not so much in the quantity or difficulty of his music, but in trying to show that Ethos originating from his music. From the first sonata to the last one, one can appreciate the multitude of ideas coming from his privileged knowledge as a composer and orchestra conductor of the great repertoire and its most hidden ins and outs. It is sometimes evident when he quotes Spanish Renaissance vihuelists such as Mudarra or Milan, but also masters of the stature of Pasquini, Beethoven or Shostakovich. Some other times he lets us glimpse details of the French harpsichord school of the 17th century, sonorities by Scriabin, Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Albéniz, or textures by Stravinsky, Bartok, minimalism, popular music and jazz. Similarly, like the vast majority of great composers, he quotes himself using written material for other instruments or instrumental groups, such as the piano, the flute, the orchestra or the guitar. Any element present in his pieces has an organic importance, which gives meaning to the whole ensemble. The golden ratio often appears in his structures, shaping the sound material in groups of measures based on the Fibonacci series as well as on the use of fractals.

This recording covers approximately five decades of literature for violoncello and orchestra- the fifty years between the two concertos by Vivaldi (ca. 1720), Haydn (ca. 1763) and Boccherini (publ. 1770). The Concerto for violoncello and strings in C minor RV 401 by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) is a beautiful and enigmatic work. The autograph is written on an unusual type of paper, and virtually all the features of the document stand out from the rest of the 27 concerts for cello written by the Venetian author. Its dating around 1720 is still a hypothesis, as well as its purpose. Even more uncertain is the origin of the Concerto for two cellos and strings in G minor RV 531. The accumulation of low instruments could make us assume that Vivaldi would choose high tessituras for soloists, something feasible and regularly used in several of his concerts for cello. Nevertheless, Vivaldi abandons this possibility. Both soloists play in the central register of the instrument and, as in the case of other double concertos by the author, the speech is articulated with transparency through third parallel voices, imitations and unaccompanied episodes. What relationship could there be between the Concerto in C major Hob VIIb 1 by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), a work written around 1763 in his secluded residence of Eisenstadt (about 60 km. from Vienna), and the Concerto in D major G. 479 by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), edited in 1770 in Paris by a composer who was already living in Spain serving as a chamber musician and composer to the Infante Don Luis de Borbón? Unexpectedly more than we could imagine…

In New York it is impossible, almost forced, not to end up trapped by the music of Philip Glass. His operas sound at the Metropolitan Opera, his portrait by Chuck Close on the 86th Street subway and that “Mad Rush” of the city that never sleeps. This project was born influenced by the performer’s musical moment and circumstances after having lived in the Big Apple for 7 years. This “Mad Rush – Philip Glass” project has brought together some of the most representative pieces by one of the most influential composers on the current music scene, recently awarded the XIV BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera “for his extraordinary contribution to musical creation and opera, with a great impact on the history of music in the 20th and 21st centuries”, according to the jury. Trained in the US at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, Fabio obtained his Master of Music with the highest qualification under the tutelage of the renowned pianist and pedagogue Philip Kawin, having previously obtained his Piano Performance Undergraduate´s Degree at Musikene, Conservatorio Superior de Música del País Vasco with Ricardo Requejo and Emmanuel Ferrer-Lalöe.

Serendipia Ensemble, Rita Rógar, and Moisés Maroto, together with their ensemble of musicians—Darío Tamayo on the harpsichord, Calia Álvarez on the viola da gamba, José Arsenio Rueda on the baroque bassoon, and Jon Wasserman exchanging his plucked string instruments (theorbo and baroque guitar)—have recorded the complete sonatas. Premiering worldwide with the record label IBS Classical.

With this large continuo group, Serendipia Ensemble seeks a unique musical approach to the concept of the triosonata, finding the common ground between the concerto form conceived by Corelli and the sonata form arranged by Schickhardt. We are now able to hear, with layering of different instruments, the triosonatas approach the concerti in sections such as the tutti-soli that we appreciate in the Corellian originals.

The feeling is dispersed in the face of new beginnings. There is nothing in the music of Juan J. Colomer (Alzira, 1966) that does not speak about it: what he enunciates, what he leaves silent, what he does not completely conceal comes to intervene like the first day between those who listen to it. The luminous passages belong to the frank way in which an idea is shaped and its detours, where it appears without veils, as essential as the darkness that, from time to time, inhabits it. Both are openings to what his work is. We look for ways of access to the present and past, to small pieces of the map, to the abandoned territory or memory, to the contradictions it interrogates. Although this time it is titled “genesis,” Colomer modulates a thought without origin or end, within a perpetually restarted discourse. This is how his invention lives outside. Perhaps in its living references, without dates or places exactly assignable, it retains the sense in which it inscribes, deprived of its ancient power, enigmatic connections, metamorphoses of times. For this reason, although it is about genesis, Colomer’s works become strange to the conditions of their creation, they are beyond the finished and the unfinished, they radiate as far as we like to imagine.

Pianist Antonio Oyarzabal continues to show us in this album that a multitude of female composers, who deserve to be known and recognized, still remain forgotten. On this occasion, he offers us a selection of pieces by 18 unique authors, most of them pianists, from different periods and geographical origins. In all cases, their professional development was hindered by their status as women and by the social pressure of the historical period in which they lived. Oyarzabal finds intense and authentic artistic stimulation in the process of researching their career paths and in the enthusiastic interpretation of their music. This second part of “La Muse Oubliée” does not intend to bring any sort of closure. On the contrary, it represents the continuation of a project as large as the number of female composers who have yet to be included…

We find ourselves in a crucial year, 1849. At that time, the Schumanns opted for a rural retreat due to the tension in Dresden, where they resided at that moment—a city that was the center of notable revolutionary episodes during the uprising that occurred there, with its epicenter in May of that year. Precisely in that fruitful year, Robert Schumann tackled several chamber works that seem to be written in a relaxed atmosphere, in a very short time, without excessive formal nor constructive ambition, but with the stamp of his high melodic and harmonic inspiration. There is a certain common denominator among them, which we could call a certain lack of instrumental definition - pieces for oboe and piano, or for horn and piano, or for clarinet and piano - but in which the “melodic” role, as indicated in the score, can be transferred to other instruments with similar “singable” capacity, either to the same woodwind family or even to the string family (violin, cello). In short, it’s about “singing without text”; they are authentic “songs without words.”

This CD presents itself before us like a photograph, still in development, of a part of the vital outline of Jesu´s Torres (1965). It shows us his essential characteristics, his concerns, and the solutions he has adopted throughout the more than twenty years covered by this volume (1997-2018). The main body of the work was written between 1997 and 2004, the time of the composition of the Variations for cello and piano, but his resources already outline and anticipate a future whose culmination -at least for the moment- we can see in his vocal music and his opera, Tránsito 2020. And not only that, he also takes us into his personal relationships with musicians with whom he shares trajectory and who have been patrons of his music. Torres composes with specific musicians in mind, amplifying their technical and expressive qualities.

The technical difficulties of this repertoire are extremely taxing. Fortunately, for this CD, Alberto Rosado, promoter of the project, has brought together a group of exceptional performers, who offer absolutely brilliant interpretations. José Luis Estellés (Fantasía for clarinet and piano), Miquel Bernat (Splendens), María Zubimendi (Accentus), David Apellániz (Variations for cello and piano), Clara Andrada (Sonata for flute and piano), and Robert Sillá (Silentum amoris). all make their corresponding interventions in exquisite and referential versions. Because after all the technical difficulties of this music, the desired reward comes to the fore. Torres offers unsurpassable moments of expressive beauty that take the performer and, therefore, the listener, to the expected Ithaca: towards pure enjoyment.

In this album, Five verses, Carlos Zaragoza shows his commitment to the evolution of the saxophone by expanding its sound possibilities. In addition, with the collaboration of pianist Kishin Nagai, they highlight the music-poetry binomial by bringing together five pieces written in the last hundred years and linked to original texts in four different languages: French, German, English, and Spanish. The lyrical and expressive quality of Zaragoza’s playing, as well as his mastery of technique, make the saxophone interpolate the listener as if they were “singing” the inspirational verses of each text through his distinctive voice.

Carlos Zaragoza is a saxophonist of extraordinary versatility. His musical expressiveness reflects the richness of his artistic personality, revealing a deep understanding of diverse artistic currents. He has performed in prestigious festivals and concert halls such as the Salle Cortot in Paris (France), the Auditorium of Zaragoza (Spain), the Théâtre de l’Alliance Française (Paris, France), the Festival France Musique Occitanie Montpellier, and the Festival de Breuillet. Kishin Nagai studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) and at the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMDP) where he completed his bachelor’s degrees in Piano, Chamber Music, and Accompaniment, as well as master’s degrees in Piano, Chamber Music, Vocal Accompaniment and Piano Accompaniment. He has already performed at major concert halls, festivals, and on radio station such as Salle Cortot in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, La Roque d’Anthéron International Piano Festival and Radio France.

La contemplazione offers a glimpse into “Viennese Classicism” through two authors who, while almost antagonistic, were also complementary and contemporary: Hummel and Schubert. In the late 1820s, European music was at a fascinating crossroads: the musical style that had dominated the old continent since 1780 (commonly known as “Viennese Classicism”) was in crisis and entering its final phase. At a time when tradition and innovation coexisted, emerging expressive needs pushed composers to seek alternatives to classical canons. La contemplazione offers a glimpse into this period through two authors who, while almost antagonistic, were also complementary and contemporary: Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828). About the Instrument: Fortepiano Graf 1826/1827 (Edwin Beunk collection)

In an environment of fierce competition among various piano manufacturing houses, Conrad Graf emerged as the reference brand in Vienna, even being named the official constructor of the empire. Graf built the piano used in this recording in 1826 or 1827 with a range of six and a half octaves.